"There is naught that you can do, other than to resist, with hope or without it. But you do not stand alone."

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Quote of the Day: Even Lazarus

No, we had never conquered death, only engineered reprieves (the pill, the powder, the angioplasty, the Fourth Age) -- enacted our conviction that more life, even a little more life, might yet yield the pleasure or wisdom we wanted or had missed in it it. No one goes home from a triple bypass or a longevity treatment expecting to live forever. Even Lazarus left the grave knowing he'd die a second time.

But he came forth. He came forth gratefully. I was grateful.

-- Robert Charles Wilson, Spin (p. 234 of the mass market paperback)

I don't know if I've ever mentioned on this blog how amazing this book is -- an example of a nearly perfect marriage of the literary and the SF novel. I've read a bunch of Wilson's novels (including the two sequels to Spin), and I've enjoyed them all (although the one from earlier in his career was noticeably weaker than the others, all from the latter half of his output to date). But none of them are as good as Spin (including, it must be said, the two sequels to Spin), which is really amazing. (And which I've now read several times -- I keep picking it up to look at some scene or another, and ending up rereading the entire book, not always in order (this most recent time, I began at the scene I as looking for, went to the end, and then started back at the beginning to catch up, as it were.)) Oh, and don't worry about the sequels -- I mean, they're good, but they're not at all necessary -- closer to separate stories set in the same universe than true sequels; certainly Spin stands entirely on its own. Highly recommended.